In brief: The MediaTek Kompanio 1380 isn’t the most advanced mobile chipset, and it certainly lacks the 5G connectivity of the Kompanio 1300T. That doesn’t stop the Taiwanese company from pitching it to OEMs such as Acer, who are looking to build premium Chromebooks and Chrome OS tablets at a more affordable price point.
MediaTek’s main focus right now is to get back into the high-end mobile chipset game with offerings such as the Dimensity 9000 SoC. Earlier this month, someone who got their hands on an engineering sample of the new chipset found it faster than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Mobile Platform and between Apple’s A14 and A15 chips in terms of performance. The story is different on the GPU side, but the MediaTek part is said to be slightly more energy-efficient than its competition.
Another area where the Taiwanese company has been trying its hand is the Chromebook market. To that end, MediaTek just unveiled its next-generation Kompanio 1380 chipset, targeting high-end Chromebooks and Chrome OS tablets.
The new chipset is built on TSMC’s 6nm process node and integrates an octa-core CPU with four high-performance Arm Cortex A-78 cores running at 3 GHz and four energy-efficient Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at 2 GHz. There’s also a five-core Mali-G57 GPU, and the chipset supports 2,133 MHz LPDDR4X RAM. This allows the Kompanio 1380 to drive up to two 4K UHD displays at 60 Hz, three 4K displays at 30 Hz, or a single 1440p display at 120 Hz.
The first device to sport the new chipset is the Acer Chromebook Spin 513. Pricing will start at $599/€649, and Acer says it’s targeting an April release window for the European and Asian markets and a June release window for Canada and the US.